Roundtable Recap: March 10 – Spotlight On India

For this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we teamed up with the Indian Angel Network (IAN).

First up, Nimesh Khiara from Mumbai, India, discussed StopWaitin, a restaurant reservation system that includes managing waiting lists and is similar in concept to OpenTable. Nimesh has a couple of corporations that are interested in beta testing his solution to offer corporate discounts to their workforces, and a few restaurants are also interested.

One of Nimesh’s questions was that he is discovering that the BPO/call center industry does not give Internet access to employees; hence, the solution would not be accessible to them. Well, this is a clear indicator that he should avoid the BPO/call center industry and focus on industry segments where corporations not only provide Internet access to their employees, but the employees themselves are tech savvy. Fortunately, there are numerous such companies in India.

I advised Nimesh to focus on getting a couple of large corporations in Mumbai and a dozen restaurants in the beta program, and get the business going. As he grows, he can simply focus on increasing the restaurant portfolio and getting more corporate clients. I also advised him to avoid consumer marketing and market his service through the HR departments of the corporations as an employee benefit. It would be much cheaper to acquire customers this way.

Manivel Karuppasamy from Bangalore, India, presented FEED (Funding Entrepreneurs, Encouraging Dreams), a crowdsourced funding marketplace for India. I did not get the sense that Manivel knows anything about raising money for businesses, and he wants to cover not only entrepreneurial fund-raising but also funding for musicians trying to produce an album, and so on. That’s a broad charter, with huge scope, and I asked Manivel how he proposes to establish trust in the exchange and prevent fraud?

It turns out that Manivel has experience raising money from philanthropic projects from his alumni association, which gave me the idea that he could create and manage white-label exchanges on behalf of various alumni associations; this approach would have built-in trust and validation mechanisms to prevent fraud.

I advised Manivel to reposition his company to cater to institutes that want to develop private funding exchanges and conduct a thorough customer validation process based on that assumption.

Next, Gurdip Singh from Gurgaon, India, discussed a subscription-based managed carpool service that would create groups of four people, each responsible for driving the others to work one week a month. The ROI is straightforward and compelling; however, how do you prevent people from finding their buddies to drive with and stopping the subscription?

Well, it turns out that Gurdip wants to do reconfiguration of alternatives if one day there is a no-show  after 30 minutes, so that all his subscribers have rides without any disruption to their schedules. Now, this is a hard problem to solve, but I can see that if Gurdip can solve it, it would mean that the service is worth subscribing to on an ongoing basis. I advised Gurdip to figure out how he would do the reconfiguration because his business depends on cracking that nut.

Edward Varghese from New Delhi, India, pitched i-Globify, an outsourcing service catering to the niche travel vertical, focusing on building Web 3.0 back ends for medical, religious, sports, and other kinds of tourism solutions.

Edward has a medical tourism portal customer for whom he is building such a solution. I liked his approach to building an outsourcing solution: focusing on a niche and building in-depth skills and credibility within that vertical. I think that Edward can not only build a successful outsourcing services company based on this premise, he can also build an IP portfolio and potentially a platform product that would make it more compelling, specialized, and higher-margin business than any old labor arbitrage shop.

Next week, we are focusing on entrepreneurs in Latin and Central America. You can register for the next roundtable here.

You can also listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.

This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships